The process by which four separate school districts implemented collaborative research to examine and improve their inservice training for teachers of bilingual students is presented. The sites were in a major far west city, a small southwestern town with a Mexican-American majority, a large southeastern school district, and two neighboring districts in the northeast. The four programs were federally funded for one year and involved teams composed of a teacher, a researcher, and a trainer/developer researching techniques and strategies of inservice training to develop into active programs. A first conclusion from the four projects reported on was that readiness within the district for such an effort was a fundamental factor in the program's success. A second conclusion was that the collaborative research process progressed in three stages requiring clearly defined researcher behavior: (1) orientation and discussion of the school's collective needs; (2) a period of consolidation, focusing on the similarities of needs across programs and developing a research design and instruments in keeping with the practitioners' frame of reference; and (3) data collection and verification, leading to design and evaluation of the final inservice plan. It was also found that teacher participation in the research design process contributed to the project's success, and that the projects were an important professional development process for the teachers involved. It is suggested that rather than label and separate the native language, standard English, and bilingual efforts, the district group them all under the rubric, "language transitioning." (MSE)